Stassen shuffled papers—notes, sure enough. “I understand the Lizards have a long head start on us in this sort of research.”
“That’s true, but there’s nothing we could do about it,” Yeager said. “They got a hatchling—uh, a human baby—right after the first round of fighting ended. We couldn’t even think of trying the same sort of experiment till the colonization fleet brought females of the Race here.”
“Of course.” The president nodded. “Now, you’ve met the girl the Lizards are raising as one of their own.” He waited for Sam to nod, too, then asked, “What do you think of her?”
“Sir, Kassquit’s . . . pretty screwy, I’m afraid,” Yeager answered. “I don’t know how else to put it. Considering the way she was brought up, I don’t suppose that’s any big surprise. It’s probably God’s own miracle that she’s not even crazier than she is.”
“Does that mean . . .” Stassen glanced down again. “Does that mean Mickey and Donald are liable to end up disturbed, too?”
“From the point of view of the Race, do you mean, sir?” Sam sighed. “I’m afraid it does. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it. I feel bad sometimes, but it’s important for us to know just how much like people they can become.” He sighed again. “Ttomalss, the Lizard who’s raised Kassquit, probably feels the same way in reverse.”
“I see.” Stassen scribbled something on a scratch pad. “To turn to another matter, how seriously do you view the spread of plants and animals from the Lizards’ home planet here on Earth?”
Did Stassen know Yeager had been seized while investigating that very thing? If he did, he didn’t show it. Sam decided to assume he didn’t, and answered, “It’s going to be a problem, yes, Mr. President. It may not be too big a problem here in the States, because I didn’t think too many creatures from Home will be able to stand the winters in most of the country. But in the tropics, especially the deserts, I’d bet there’ll be wholesale replacements. The Lizards are going to try to make Earth over to suit themselves. We’d probably do the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Stassen wrote himself another note. “Your opinion closely matches the views of other experts I’ve consulted.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Sam breathed a little easier. This was just business. With any luck at all, he’d be able to get back home and go on raising the Lizard hatchlings—and, rather more than incidentally, getting ready for Jonathan’s wedding. He shifted in his chair, getting ready to stand up. “Is there anything else?”
“Just one thing more, Lieutenant Colonel.” The president switched gears: “How do you feel about your part in everything that’s happened over the past few months?”
Yeager grunted, but did his best to pull his face straight. Don’t rub. “Sir, I did what I thought I had to do,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“And you have no trouble living with the loss of Indianapolis?” Stassen asked.
“No trouble?” Sam shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that, Mr. President. I wouldn’t say that at all. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it. But the scales balance, as far as I’m concerned. Do you think President Warren lost any sleep over the Lizards in the colonization fleet?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Stassen said. “Until the recent tragic events, I had no idea he’d had anything to do with them.” His chuckle was mirthless. “As you may know, the vice president mostly has about as much use as the vermiform appendix.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you should have known what he’d done,” Yeager said. “The way things are these days, a vice president needs to be able to hit the ground running if he finds out he’s president all of a sudden. And that’s happened a couple of times lately—well, Cordell Hull wasn’t vice president when he took over, but you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” the president agreed. “Hull probably had an easier time taking over than I did, because he was more involved in making decisions than I was. President Warren did as he thought best. Now I have to do the same.”
He started to say something more, but checked himself. Sam had a pretty good idea of what it would have been, though. Everything would have been fine if only you hadn’t stuck your big nose into the middle of things. It was even true, for those who didn’t think of the Lizards as people. Earl Warren hadn’t, not down deep where it counted.
“Is there anything else?” Sam asked again.
This time, Harold Stassen shook his head. “That will be all, Lieutenant Colonel. I did want to meet you, though. I think you understand the reasons for my curiosity.”
“Yes, sir, I think so.” Now Yeager was the one who didn’t say everything he was thinking. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be president right now. He’d never dreamt of having that kind of influence on events. He’d never wanted it, either. But what you wanted and what you got were two different things. He’d turned fifty-eight this year. For a while there, in that house somewhere near the Four Corners, he’d wondered if he would ever see an-other birthday.
“All right, then,” Stassen told him. “You may go.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” But before he left the office, Sam said, “May I ask you something, sir?”
“Go ahead,” the president said. “But I don’t promise to answer. I think you understand the reasons for that, too.”
Nobody will ever trust you with anything truly important again, not as long as you live. That was what the president meant, even if he was too polite to say so. Sam held his face steady. Don’t rub, no matter how much it hurts. He tried to speak casually, too: “Wasn’t that an awfully big meteor that slammed into Mars? The Race’s computer network had some pretty spectacular pictures from their space-based telescopes.”
“Yes, I’ve seen a few of them,” Harold Stassen said. “The astronomers will have a new crater to name, from what I understand. Mars, fortunately, is pretty much worthless real estate.”
“A good thing a rock that size didn’t hit Earth,” Sam agreed. “It would have been worse than an explosive-metal bomb, from what the Lizards say.”
“You’re probably right—or my briefing officers tell me the same thing, anyhow,” Stassen said. “Now, what was this question you wanted to ask?”
“Never mind, sir,” Sam said. “You’d probably just tell me I was sticking my nose in again where it didn’t belong, and I don’t see much point to that. I’ll keep my mouth shut from the beginning this time.”
“That is probably a very good idea,” the president said. “Good day, Lieutenant Colonel, and a safe flight back to Los Angeles.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Yeager wished Stassen hadn’t said that. Now he was going to worry till the airplane’s landing gear hit the runway at L.A. International Airport. The president, or people close to him, wouldn’t make an airliner crash to get rid of one gadfly. . . would they? Sam didn’t want to think so, but he knew there were people who wanted to see him dead.
If something like that happened, the Lizards would have a lot of sharp questions to ask American authorities. If they didn’t like the answers they got, they were liable to take a spectacular revenge. Sam didn’t care too much about that—he wouldn’t be around to see it. But the thought of such revenge might give second thoughts to anybody who wanted his family to cash his life-insurance policy.
When Yeager got back out onto the street, he noticed that some of the trees were going from green to yellow and red. He’d been too worried about the meeting to pay any attention to that when he came to the Gray House. Now the sight made him smile. Living in California as he did these days, he seldom got such strong reminders of the passage from one season to the next.
He took a deep breath, then let it out. I made it, he thought. If my plane home doesn’t crash, I made it, anyhow. He didn’t really believe that would happen. Had Stassen wanted to get rid of him, his flight comi
ng into Little Rock could have crashed, too. Everything’s going to be okay. Sometimes he could make himself believe that for as long as two or three minutes at a time.
“I shall soon be returning to the starship,” Ttomalss said from the monitor. Kassquit watched him with something less than delight. He was, as happened all too often these days, oblivious to that. Sounding more cheerful than he had any reasonable business being, he went on, “And then, I hope, your life can return to something approaching normal after the stressful time you have endured.”
“How do you define ‘normal,’ superior sir?” Kassquit asked.
“Why, as things were before you became involved with Big Uglies, of course,” Ttomalss answered. “That is your default setting, so to speak. Would not a return to such conditions prove welcome?”
He does not understand, Kassquit thought. And he has no idea how much of my interior life he either misunderstands or misses altogether. He was, after all, a male of the Race. And she . . . wasn’t a female of the Race, no matter how much of a duplicate of a female of the Race he’d tried to make her into.
Speaking carefully, she replied, “If I could forget the memories of the time when Jonathan Yeager was here, that might perhaps be possible, superior sir. As things are, however, I have learned what it means to be part of a species with a continuously active sexuality. This knowledge goes some way toward redefining normality for me.”
And the inside of a fusion reaction is rather warm, and walking from Tosev 3 to Home would take a long time. Kassquit felt in her belly the size of the understatement she’d just given her mentor.
Ttomalss, however, took it as literal truth without understatement. He said, “I suspect time will create a certain distancing effect. Your emotions will no longer seem so urgent as they do now.”
That did it. Kassquit snapped, “Do you not see—can you not see—that I do not want these emotions to fade? I want to preserve them. I want to feel others like them. They come closer to making life worth living than anything I have ever known aboard this starship.”
“Oh,” Ttomalss said tonelessly.
Kassquit knew she’d wounded him. Part of her was too angry to care. The rest of her remembered the time when he’d been far and away the most important individual in her universe. It hadn’t been very long before. It only seemed like forever. Her hands folded into fists. She was at war within herself. She feared she would stay that way as long as she lived.
Gathering himself, Ttomalss said, “Obliging you in this regard will not be easy, you know. I must tell you that, even among Tosevites, regular sexual relations do not necessarily guarantee happiness. The literature and music and moving pictures the Tosevites produce demonstrate as much without the shed skin of a doubt.”
“I believe it,” Kassquit said. “Please understand that I am not seeking only sexual pleasure. I can, to some degree, supply that for myself. But the companionship I enjoyed with Jonathan Yeager along with the sexual pleasure . . . I miss that very much.” She sighed. “However much I might wish to be one, I am not and cannot be a female of the Race. I am, to some degree, irrevocably a Big Ugly.”
She’d had that thought before she’d ever met any wild Tosevites, too. It had horrified and disgusted her then. It still did, to some degree. But she could not deny that she wanted to know more of the feelings she’d had when Jonathan Yeager was aboard the starship with her.
Ttomalss said, “Several Tosevite languages have a word for the emotional state you describe. Jonathan Yeager used the tongue called English, is that not a truth? In English, the term is . . .” He paused to consult the computer, then made the affirmative gesture to show he’d found what he wanted. “The term is love.”
By the nature of things, he could have only an intellectual understanding of the emotion he named. But he was not a fool; he had indeed identified the feeling Kassquit craved. She made the affirmative gesture, too. “Jonathan Yeager taught me the word,” she agreed. “And, as you must know, he has informed me that he is entering into a permanent mating arrangement with a wild female Big Ugly—that, in effect, he loves someone else. This has been difficult for me to accept with equanimity.”
There. She’d topped her own earlier understatement. She hadn’t thought she could.
“You knew when Jonathan Yeager came to the starship that his relation with you would be only temporary,” Ttomalss reminded her. “It was as much an experiment from his perspective as from yours—an experiment prolonged because of the fighting that broke out against the Deutsche. Perhaps it would have been better had the experiment not been prolonged.”
“Yes, perhaps it would have,” Kassquit said. “But I cannot do anything about that except try to adjust as well as I can to the consequences of what did happen. Learning to experience this intensely pleasurable emotion and then having it taken away has been difficult.” Another fine understatement.
“I have asked you before if you wanted me to find you another Tosevite male,” Ttomalss said. “If you wish me to do so, I will do my best to provide you with one who will be pleasing.”
“I thank you, superior sir, but that is still not what I want,” Kassquit said. “For one thing, I have no certainty of matching the pleasure I received from Jonathan Yeager, pleasure both sexual and emotional. For another, suppose I should. That liaison would also necessarily be temporary, and I would go into another fit of depression after it ended. From what I am given to understand, this is rather like the emotional cycle ginger tasters experience.”
“Perhaps it is. I cannot speak there from personal experience, and I am glad I cannot,” Ttomalss said. “I can say that some ginger tasters appear to enjoy the cycle between pleasure and gloom, while others wish they could escape it and escape from their use of the herb.”
“But what am I to do?” Kassquit asked, though Ttomalss was hardly in a position to be able to tell her.
He pointed that out: “Your two choices are to remain as you are and to regret the one sexual and emotional relationship you had or to embark on another and then come to regret that, too. I would be the first to admit that neither of these strikes me as ideal.”
“They both strike me as disastrous.” Kassquit’s fingerclaws were short and wide and blunt. They bit into the soft flesh of her palms even so. “And yet, superior sir, I see no others, either.”
“We shall do what we can for you, Kassquit. On that you have my word,” Ttomalss said. Kassquit wondered how much his word would be worth, and whether it would be worth anything. But she did believe he would try. He went on, “Soon I shall see you in person. I look forward to it. For now, farewell.”
“Farewell,” Kassquit echoed, and Ttomalss’ image vanished from the monitor.
She looked around her cubicle and sighed again. For most of her life, this little space had been her refuge against the males—and, later, the females—of the Race who’d scorned her. Now it seemed much more like a trap. What could she do here by herself? What could she do anywhere here by herself? And how, among the males and females of the Race, could she ever feel as if she weren’t by herself? Her hand shaped the negative gesture. It was impossible.
After shaping that gesture, she scratched her head. It felt rough and a little itchy. She should have shaved it the day before, but she hadn’t felt like taking the trouble. The next time she washed, though, she would have to do it.
Why bother? she wondered. The answer leaped into her mind as soon as the thought formed: to look more as if I were a member of the Race.
Kassquit walked over to the built-in mirror in the cubicle. As always, she had to stoop a little to see herself in it; it was made for a member of the Race, not a Big Ugly. She looked at her flat, vertical, short-snouted, softskinned, eye-turretless face with the fleshy sound receptors to either side.
“What difference would hair make?” she said aloud. Try as she would, she’d never look like a member of the Race. Then a new thought occurred to her. “Rabotevs and Hallessi do not look like members of the Race, eit
her, but they are citizens of the Empire. I am a Tosevite citizen of the Empire. If I want, I can look like a Tosevite.”
Wild Big Uglies—except the ones like Jonathan Yeager, who also imitated the Race—let their hair grow. Even Jonathan Yeager had shaved only the hair on his scalp and face, not that on the rest of his body. And, from what he had said, most females, even among those who imitated the Race, let the hair on their scalps grow.
That female with whom he will be mating, that Karen Culpepper, probably has hair, Kassquit thought. At first, that struck her as a good argument for shaving. But then she hesitated. Perhaps hair increased sexual attractiveness, in the same way that, among the Race, a male’s upraised scaly crest helped prompt a female to mate with him.
I am a Big Ugly. I cannot help being a Big Ugly. Even after this world becomes part of the Empire, Tosevite citizens of the Empire will probably go right on letting their hair grow. Why should I not do the same? I cannot be a female of the Race, but I can be a Tosevite female who is a citizen of the Empire. In fact, I cannot be anything else.
She ran a hand over her scalp, wondering how long the hair would take to grow to a respectable length. Then she let that hand slide down between her legs. She would grow hair there, too, and under her arms as well. She wondered whether she ought to keep shaving those areas even if she left her scalp alone. Then she shrugged. Jonathan Yeager hadn’t shaved around his private parts, or under his arms, either. She decided to let the hair grow. If she decided she didn’t like it, she could always get rid of it later.
The hair on her scalp quickly became noticeable. After she’d ignored the razor only a few days, the researcher named Tessrek spoke to her in the refectory: “Are you trying to look like a wild Big Ugly? If so, you are succeeding.”
He’d never liked her, not even when she was a hatchling. She didn’t like him, either, not even a little. She answered, “Why should I not look like a Tosevite, superior sir? As you never tire of pointing out, it is what I am.”
Aftershocks Page 49
